www/notes/steam.md

Steam

• Steam Store

Resources

• Steam Web API Documentation
• Steamworks Documentation
• Valve Developer Wiki

Third-party Resources

• SteamDB
  • tracks depot changes, price history, everything steam
• gg.deals
  • tracks game deals for steam, steam key stores and other platforms
• IsThereAnyDeal
  • similar to gg.deals except it does not support key seller tracking
• SteamGifts
  • giveaway Steam keys or take part in giveaways
• SteamTradeMatcher
  • one-to-one trading of items on Steam
• ArchiSteamFarm
  • useful bot written in C# to farm trading cards for owned games that can be sold
• SteamGridDB
  • custom video game assets for games available and not available on Steam
• ProtonDB
  • community-sourced Linux and Steam Deck compatibility tracker

Steam Client

• Steam Client Valve Wiki Page
• SteamCMD Valve Wiki Page

Accessing the Console

• Use the following URIs on a browser or a file manager to open GUI client with the console:
  • steam://nav/console
  • steam://open/console
    • will not work if the Steam client is running in the background
• The -console flag can be used with the client executable
• Alternatively, SteamCMD, a command-line only version of the Steam client, can be used
  • Windows Binary (.zip)
  • Linux Binary (.zip)
  • macOS Binary (.zip)

Downloading Older Depots

Download a single depot (used to download older versions of applications/games):

download_depot <appid> <depotid> [<target manifestid>] [<delta manifestid>][<depot flags filter>]

SteamDB can be used to find the required argument values.

Steam Deck

• Official Website

Third-party Software

• Decky Plugin Loader
  • Source: GitHub / SteamDeckHomebrew
  • Installer: decky_installer.desktop

Console-like Youtube in Gaming Mode

• Using Chromium's undocumented command-line options, the user agent can be changed to PlayStation's, Xbox's or Tizen's (Samsung's TV OS) and the application can be launched in full screen by using the --kiosk flag. The following XDG Desktop Configuration, for example, can be used and added as a non-Steam game while in Desktop mode for access in gaming mode

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=YouTube TV
GenericName=Online Video Platform
Comment=An online video-sharing, social media platform
Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=master --arch=x86_64 --file-forwarding org.chromium.Chrome @@ %F @@ --user-agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; Xbox; Xbox Series X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.82 Safari/537.36 Edge/20.02' --kiosk 'https://www.youtube.com/tv'
Terminal=false
MimeType=text/plain;
# $XDG_PATH contains the paths used to fetch icons, extensions for supported formats are optional Icon=com.youtube.tv

• Firefox can also be used however the supported command-line options are limited
• The URL for the TV user interface is https://www.youtube.com/tv
• Without the user agent change, the above URL is inaccessible and will redirect you to the desktop version of the website
• Adblockers like uBlock Origin, AdBlock Plus (both tested) do not remove ads even if they work with the desktop version
• Choosing an Xbox user agent is recommended as button prompts match the Steam Deck's ABXY button layout
• The Electron framework can be used to build a wrapper for the URL
  • This is the preferable method as it supports exiting from within the application, while browsers only support manual termination from the Steam menu.
  • Sample code for the electron app (assuming you can build linux binaries for the target platform):

    // sample code to get started
    const { app, BrowserWindow } = require('electron');
    app
      .whenReady()
      .then(() => {
        const win = new BrowserWindow({
          backgroundColor: '#2e2c29',
          kiosk: true,
        });
        win.maximize();
        win.loadURL('https://youtube.com/tv');
        win.webContents.userAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; Xbox; Xbox Series X) '
        + 'AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) '
        + 'Chrome/48.0.2564.82 Safari/537.36 Edge/20.02';
      })
      .catch(() => { });
  

Miscellaneous

• When using a dock or a hub to connect to an external display, ensure the display supports the refresh rate set on the device; some TVs and some monitors only support refresh rates that are multiples of 30Hz